Articles

HCC to participate in Houston cybersecurity summit

Feb 23, 2018

When it comes to being hacked, everything is vulnerable: your car, your bank account, and even your home lock and alarm controls. The second annual Houston Cyber Summit, held on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at the George R. Brown Convention Center, aims to help business executives secure their companies, along with your information and safety.

The one-day conference, organized by Blue Lance, tackles the issues of governing, legality and risk management that executives should be looking at in their companies. Douglas Rowlett, dean of the Houston Community College Center of Excellence for Digital and Information Technology, will take part again this year in one of the five panel discussions highlighting education’s role in cybersecurity.

“HCC is training skilled cybersecurity workers,” Rowlett said. “HCC holds the Center of Academic Excellence-Two Year Education designation and is certified by the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security. We are one of three community colleges in the state to hold this prestigious designation. The University of Houston holds the four-year school designation, enabling us to form a natural partnership in cybersecurity.”

According to Umesh Verma, founder of the Houston Cyber Summit, the target audience is business leadership, not techies.

Verma said, “The summit will break down complex cybersecurity issues and executives will walk away with an instructional manual to go back and start assessing their company, learn how to implement new procedures and start protecting their business.”

Rowlett said the field of cybersecurity opens a broad path to education and employment.

“It’s a high demand, high salary field. There are estimates of more than one million jobs unfilled in the U.S. in the next few years,” he said. “You can be a forensic analyst or you can work in detection, prevention, recovery and even administration.”

“We are happy to have HCC as part of the discussion,” Verma said. “HCC has been forward-looking and has ramped up quickly to a prestigious cybersecurity program providing all levels of skilled workers and making them productive members of companies.”

Hewlett Packard is the lead sponsor with roughly 20 other participating sponsors, including HCC. Networking and cybersecurity faculty from HCC will work a booth with program materials and interactive displays alongside HCC cybersecurity program partners from UH and Texas A&M.

Register online for the Houston Cyber Summit here. The registration fee is $195 online and at the door.

For more information on the HCC Cybersecurity program, please visit hccs.edu/cyber.